Marketing

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined two owners of a marketing company £440,000 ($713,000) for bombarding the public with millions of unlawful spam texts over a period of three years. It’s the first time that the ICO has used its power to issue a monetary penalty for a serious breach of the UK Privacy

Kurt Wismer posted a much-to-the-point blog a few days ago about the way that purveyors of scareware (fake/rogue anti-virus/security products) mimic the marketing practices of legitimate security providers. You may remember that a while ago, I commented here about a post by Rob Rosenberger that made some related points. If you’re a regular reader of

All this is potentially frightening and inconvenient (or worse) for a home user. And if it happens in a corporate environment, it can be very, very expensive to remedy. So while some of the public comments we see in the wake of such incidents may seem over the top, “FP rage” is certainly understandable.

Round here, we're more than a little concerned about fake/rogue antivirus (and other fake security software). It's an ugly form of ransomware that hurts its victims in many ways. It scares them by threatening dire consequences and damage from malware that doesn't exist (except in the sense that the fake AV is itself malware), in

I don’t regard myself as being particularly naive: I know as well as you do that having an excellent product is not enough on its own. You usually have to market it properly as well: otherwise, it sinks because no-one is buying it, so no-one is making a living. I know, too, that this industry is not